A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

SENATOR JOHN GLENN: Okay. As Linda just noted, one of the key recommendations on the table for our report is a business-state partnership. And the seeds for this idea came out of our third meeting, and we clearly have to spend time tomorrow thinking about it in more detail. But to help inform that discussion, I'm pleased to introduce two experts on teacher compensation. First we'll hear from Dr. Carolyn Kelley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who, among several interests, has done research on the motivational effects of compensation on teachers. Now, based on the clarity of the materials in the briefing book, I know we're in for a real treat on that.

And secondly, we'll hear from Tom Gillett, First Vice President and Chief Negotiator of the Rochester, New York, Teachers Association. Tom works closely with Adam Urbanski, President of the Rochester Teachers Association. Adam had hoped to join us but a family emergency necessitated a change in his plans.

Tom and Adam worked with the Teacher Union Reform Network, TURN, a consortium of 21 districts that seeks to redefine the role of teachers and their unions in the context of school reform. One key component is teacher compensation.

They'll talk for about 15 or 20 minutes and then we'll entertain questions immediately thereafter and then we'll have a little break right after that.

So, if we could proceed. Thank you.

DR. CAROLYN KELLEY: Thank you.

[See Slide 1] It's a pleasure to be here today to share with you some of the research that I have done with my colleagues at the Consortium for Policy Research and Education on new approaches to compensating teachers.

I'm going to go through the first few very quickly.

[See Slide 2] The idea of strategic use of teacher compensation to better support the educational goals of schools was first proposed in a book that Alan Odden and I wrote called "Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do." And the ideas -- we adapted the ideas from research in the business -- on business, that was done primarily by Ed Lawler at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC.

Lawler and others have suggested, with the increasing global competition in the private sector, it's increasingly important that businesses, in particular, be flexible and dynamic and he's written a lot about how organizations can use all of their resources to strategically align themselves to promote that flexibility.

And we took some of those ideas and looked at how they might be applied to enhance the performance of schools as well.

[See Slide 3] I'm going to talk about -- briefly -- about four ideas. First of all, the rationale for changing compensation, a little bit about group-based performance pay, knowledge and skill-based pay, and then a couple of examples of models of how this might be done and some examples, and some suggestions for policy.

I think the bottom line, though, to put it on the table, I think, is that it's important to begin to design compensation with the end in mind. This is sort of Lawler's idea -- that we begin with careful consideration of what the desired outcomes are and then what types of organization you want to, or you need to, produce those outcomes, and then you go back to what kinds of incentives are there in the compensation system that will promote the kinds of outcomes that you're looking for.

[See Slide 4] So, why teacher compensation? As you know, compensation is a huge amount of the education budget, and it represents a significant public and organizational investment.

Since there are incentives embedded in any compensation system, I think the question isn't whether to use compensation strategically, but rather to figure out what incentives you do want to create and then to use compensation to support those kinds of incentives.

Compensation is also been proposed and is being used as part of the efforts to professionalize the teaching force. The work of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, for example, has been supported by a number of states who have begun to pay for teachers who, pay additional salary increases for teachers who become board-certified, and it could potentially also be used to support other kinds of newly emerging professional models, such as the state professional -- the work of state professional teaching standards boards and some of the state efforts to raise expectations for teacher licensure policy.

In addition, in the 1999 education summit that was -- took place last fall -- recommended linking teacher pay to performance as a means of enhancing teacher quality. And so one of the things that we've been very interested in is trying to help shape some of the policies that emerge from this debate in ways that are supporting more effective approaches to linking pay to performance than we've tried in the past.

And then, finally, we now have actually a growing number of examples of new forms of pay that have been tried in other types of organizations and are now being tried in education. And we have a little bit of evidence to show what the effects of those are. And I'm going to talk specifically about them here.

[See Slide 5] I'm going to refer to both of these as forms of (quote-unquote) "performance pay," partly in light of the work of the governors and the education summit because I think that the ideas behind that were really to find ways to link pay to the demonstration of knowledge and to skills and to student outcomes. And that's really what these two forms of pay do.

Group-based performance pay, as Linda said, provides bonuses for all faculty or for teams of faculty in schools that meet preset performance improvement targets and knowledge. And skill-based pay provides increases for demonstrated improvements in knowledge, skills and expertise needed to improve student achievement.

Thanks.

[See Slide 6] Group-based performance pay, of which school-based performance pay is one type, where the group is defined as the entire school so that all the faculty in an entire school would get a bonus if the school achieved its improvement goals, is one form, excuse me, differs from individual performance pay or merit pay in both purpose and effect. And I think it's important to make the distinction between this group performance pay and individual pay in light of what I said earlier about thinking about what the ends are in mind and then how the incentives are going to work toward those.

While both merit pay and school-based performance pay link compensation to performance, merit pay recognizes individual high performers, while school-based performance pay uses compensation more strategically to create an organizational dynamic that supports long-term improvement in organizational capacity to perform at a high level.

So it really provides incentives for collaboration among teachers where individual merit pay tends to provide more incentives for competition among teachers, especially as some of these models have been designed in the past.

And you had some things in your packet, I know, that spoke to that.

There's also a large and growing number of examples of school-based performance award programs, which are typically consistent with research in schools and other types of organizations. They've had similar findings.

Some of the key features -- I'm not going to read the list, you can look at it yourself. There are other examples. This is just a sample. But some of the things I wanted to say about them are to sort of characterize what some of the design features are in these programs.

Most of the programs here include rewards for improved performance, as was mentioned earlier, toward a prespecified level. Rather than rewarding high levels of performance, the idea is to try to encourage a continuous improvement model in schools, so you want to reward improved effort over time rather than just high levels.

And that could be done through, within a group of students, a value-added approach that looks at sort of before and after gains in a small group of students, or across cohorts of students.

Rewards are typically paid to all the teachers in the school or to teachers and staff or, in some cases, there's a couple of examples up here, where the money goes to the school budget. And we have a little bit of evidence that suggests that rewards paid to teachers may be more effective at getting the kinds of changes in behavior that are desired than rewards to the school, which may have more effect on the principal's behavior than on the teachers' behavior.

Performance is measured using both academic achievement and other kinds of factors like attendance and drop-out rates, noncognitive factors. And there's usually some means of addressing special population issues, like what do you with mobility and special ed students who may not be disposed to do as well on the test or limited-English-proficient, et cetera.

There's also, typically, some kind of intervention for declining schools, and supports for all schools to achieve their goals, such as sharing of best practices, providing of data and feedback to schools, and professional development opportunities.

And typically, all schools that reach the improvement target receive the award, so there isn't a quota system where only the highest three performers get the award, but anyone, you know ahead of time that you will get the award if you reach a certain level and that's important for motivational purposes.

[See Slide 7] Some of the research that we've done on school-based performance pay has shown that these programs seem to help define and focus teachers on key achievement goals. They also -- teachers seem to be more receptive to these programs when there are adequate base pay and working conditions in the school before the bonus program. When that's the case, teachers seem to be motivated and pleased with about $2,000 in the research that we've done.

Pay is one of a number of positive outcomes that teachers have associated with program participation though. Other things include opportunities for enhanced teacher collaboration, seeing student performance improve, and enhance teacher learning. Teachers say these are things that they like, positive outcomes that they associate with the program in addition to getting the bonus.

Teachers must believe that they can achieve the goals for the program to be effective. We looked at within some programs at schools that were more successful and less successful and tried to see what was different between the two, and the more successful schools had teachers who believed that they could achieve the goals.

So then we looked at what kinds of things were associated with teachers who believed they could achieve the goals, and there seemed to be some common organizational conditions in place that were critical to high teacher expectancy. Things like feedback, having a pretty quick turnaround of data from previous performance and knowing how to use the data to enhance instructional practice, principal leadership in support of the program, a lack of goal conflict, teachers weren't sort of distracted to other things other than the goals of the program.

Teachers needed to believe that the program was fair and a history of success with the program was also helpful.

So that suggests you can design features, as well as, you know, the idea that these programs shouldn't be viewed as a one-shot -- you know, just change the compensation and everything else is going to be OK, but that it really is a system that needs to change.

You might want to, for example, with the history of success in the program, you might want to design a program that enables a significant number of teachers or of schools to succeed so that teachers have some experience of success and it wasn't viewed as something that only a few schools could do.

Measurement matters, in the sense that what you measure, you tend to get more of what you ask for, and so you want to make sure that the assessment that you're using is really what -- is really something that you want people to focus on and enhance and use in their practice.

And finally, like a lot of reforms, elementary schools seem to be easier to move than middle or high schools with a school-level award. It may be that some subschool group might be more effective at high schools just because of the differences in the way they're organized. That's not research-based, but I'm just asserting that based on what we saw.

Yes, go ahead.

[See Slide 8] The second form of pay I'd like to talk about briefly is knowledge and skills-based pay, and I want to distinguish this. We were talking about career ladders. You were talking about career ladders a little earlier.

I like to think of this as being somewhat different from career ladders in that I think that the rationale for the development of career ladders was really to try to address the problem of the flat career structure of teaching, and so the idea was to try to create levels of teaching. And in a lot of these programs, what the end result was was a sort of mini-administrative bureaucracy whereas teachers moved up the career ladder and they were taken out of the classroom increasingly to do administrative tasks, versus, I think, what knowledge and skill-based pay is trying to do is to encourage and provide incentives for enhanced knowledge and skills that teachers could use in the classroom, so it wouldn't be sort of pulling them out.

I think it's a subtle but maybe important difference.

Knowledge and skill-based pay provides incentives for focused professional growth by teachers, and rewards individual initiative, knowledge and skill and high individual performance.

There are a variety of models that one could imagine. I'm going to talk about a couple of them with respect to knowledge and skill-based pay.

The most common thing probably going on right now in policy is that there are about 30 states, and this number's been growing rapidly, and a large number of districts that provide pay supplements or bonuses for certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

And I think in your packets there are some examples of that.

There are also a number of districts that have -- have or are developing more elaborate models. And I'm going to talk about sort of a derivative of a couple of those in a minute here.

[See Slide 9] The more elaborate models are sort of built typically anchored on three pretty recently developed teacher assessments which, again, were described in your materials.

At the entry level, the Educational Testing Service's Praxis, Praxis III, a particular exam, and INTASC, which was initially developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers, provide pretty high-level, but high-level entry level assessment for teachers coming into the profession.

And at the advanced level, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has become a pretty commonly viewed measure of teacher expertise.

Between those are one of the things that we've seen increasingly is the use of a framework developed by Charlotte Danielson, who was an employee of ETS, who wanted to try to find a way to create an evaluation system that would bridge that entry level and the National Board. And so she's developed sort of a system of really evaluation, but a number of districts are beginning to look at ways to use this for compensation as well.

I just -- I should note, too, that one of the advantages, I think, of a knowledge and skill-based pay system and one of the things that makes it attractive to teachers is that, under the current system, it can take a very long time and a lot of education to get from the bottom of the salary schedule to the top. And one of the promises, I guess, of the knowledge and skill-based pay system is that teachers with high levels of knowledge and skills can move much more quickly up through the knowledge and skill ladder, if you will, so that it may take more like 15 years instead of 30 to get from the beginning levels to the top, including National Board certification.

[See Slide 10] I'm just going to quickly -- a couple of examples. The first one is sort of an add-on example. To the left of the picture there is a typical single salary schedule with pay increments for years of experience down the side and additional education across the top. And what this would do is just add another set of means of qualifying for additional pay. That could include things like pay bonuses for achieving school-level awards or any one of the other things mentioned there -- National Board certification, passing a high-level content test, which may be important in math and science in particular to show that people have the content knowledge if not, you know, at a very basic level.

You could provide more for licensing in a second subject or shortage area, and expertise in scoring student work to standards.

I think I'm taking too much time.

[See Slide 11] Douglas County, Colorado, is an example of this kind of an add-on system. They use about 1.5 percent of their salary budget for a fairly elaborate set of compensation add-on features. One thing that they've changed is that they, rather than just paying people for additional years of experience, they require at least a satisfactory review in the annual review in order to advance to the next step on the schedule, and then they have a number of elements that teachers can be eligible for, including an outstanding teacher portfolio, which is similar to National Board certification, a district-provided skill training. Teachers have to participate in the training and then actually demonstrate the use of that skill in their teaching practice in order to qualify for the award.

And they also have a group incentive program that, at the school level, that, actually it's subschool level now, where teachers can qualify for bonuses.

[See Slide 12] Alternatively, a more elaborate model. This model is similar to one being discussed in Cincinnati and Austin, Texas right now. On the left-hand column, if you read from the bottom up, teachers would enter the system with an initial licensure and then the shaded column shows how long they would be able to stay at that level before they had to move on. And also that teachers might, at each level, only be allowed to receive a few pay increases before they had to go to the next level, so there would be an incentive for people to keep moving up in knowledge and skills in order to continue to be eligible for additional pay.

And then, the right-hand column is similar to what was on the other model, where you'd have an overlay of some other ways of achieving -- of qualifying for additional pay.

[See Slide 13] In general, I think these two performance pay approaches, school-based performance pay and knowledge and skill-based pay, can help to define and raise performance expectations and standards of professional practice by rewarding teachers either at the whole-school level, at the group level, or in the case of knowledge and skill-based pay, at the individual level for enhancements in their own professional practice and performance outcomes.

MEMBER: Thanks.

DR. KELLEY: I'm done. Yes.

MEMBER: OK.

Let me ask a couple of questions. There are a lot of references there to goals and performance. Do any of these include students' test scores or standardized tests? You didn't mention those. Is that what that means by ...

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: ... pay for performance.

DR. KELLEY: Yes. In the performance pay element, typically the bulk of the performance would be based on student achievement on a -- some kind of assessment. And then there's usually a smaller component that sort of noncognitive, not based on assessment.

MEMBER: OK. And all the additional pay that teachers would get under this for different things that occurred there and goals and performance, what you're really looking for eventually is to make teachers' take-home pay comparable to other good professions.

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: And that's way below, even with all this, I would think, we'd still be below some of those other professions that we're trying to compete with for good people.

DR. KELLEY: Yes, I think there's two things...

MEMBER: Did you do any comparison work in that?

DR. KELLEY: I think -- I mean, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I think that's true that, you know, there is some of that underlying this, but it's not just about amount, though. I think it's also about how do teachers qualify for the pay that they get, and trying to make the pay that they get contingent on the enhancement of knowledge and skills, at least some of it, in order to give them an incentive.

But as I said, you know, any compensation system has incentives embedded in it, and I think the incentives we have right now are to encourage people to stay within a system in order to get the pay year-by-year increases, and to keep taking courses. And the courses may or may not be the ones that are really, you know, giving the content knowledge that we want people to have.

MEMBER: One of the things that Secretary Riley has talked about some and I know he's advocated yearly salaries so that we don't have some of this disparity in that area between this and other professions. Did you address that at all? Or look at that?

DR KELLEY: I didn't talk about it here. It's not something that we've looked -- we've tried to look at how the money is paid, rather than the amount, because the amount is -- it's just a different question. But I mean, the issue of how much and how much teachers get paid relative to other professions is an important issue, and certainly, if you're looking at compensation, you want to think about what, you know, what role does compensation, what role does each piece of compensation play and a big piece of compensation is how do you recruit people away from other opportunities for similarly skilled people in the marketplace.

MEMBER: Well, what you were doing -- you were taking existing salaries and saying...

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: ... even though we know they're low...

DR. KELLEY: How could we distribute them differently to try to...

MEMBER: What's the most effective way to use this existing low salary base?

DR. KELLEY: Exactly.

MEMBER: OK, all right.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Deborah.

MEMBER: Carolyn, there are three questions that I wanted to know if you can speak to at all from your research or from other research on this.

The first is: In the studies that examine how pay affects teacher performance, I'm interested in the degree to which these probe different subject matters. Some of the research I've read, for example, looks specifically at improvements in reading instruction, but doesn't look at others. And I'm curious on a couple of things. To what extent has this been done in math and science? And if so, how does it compare across subject matters? Is their effect equal across subject matters? Or does it make a difference?

Second, in the effort to examine the relationship between teacher pay and student performance, to what extent are the measures of student performance of the high standards to which most of the reforms aspire? Some of the research I've looked at examines improvement in student performance on relatively low level tests, which is, of course, important, but one question we would have as a Commission is would this leverage improvements of instruction of kinds that we're trying to work toward, not simply what we haven't been able to do in the past?

And finally, I was very struck with your comment that teachers have to believe they can make a difference for this to have an affect. And since one of the things we know quite solidly from research is that teachers' expectations of their students -- in fact, this showed up in the research that we read for today as well -- dramatically impact the effort that they put and the effects they have on students. To what extent do these studies of student -- of teacher performance pay -- have they been done in situations with high-risk students that teachers sometimes haven't put as much effort toward? Has this improved the effort teachers put toward students they believe might not succeed?

Some of the material we read showed that teachers were sometimes drawn away from working with those students because they wanted to succeed to earn the money and that this effect did not improve their efforts with those students, but in effect reduced it.

And I'm curious, on all three of these, I'd like a little more fine grain since, if we're going to recommend this, we need to know how it will affect the sorts of goals in math and science for all students that the Commission is concerned with.

DR. KELLEY: OK. I think with regard to your first question, does -- is there evidence that pay for performance affects different subject matters differently or...

MEMBER: And to what extent has it even been done, you know, how...

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: You know, what's the distribution of subject matter?

DR. KELLEY: You know, I -- with regard to the affect on performance generally, my -- there is, I would say, more than anecdotal, but there is some evidence to suggest that these systems enhance performance. If you look across examples, the examples that we know of, those places have all reported to us at least, and in some more scholarly writings, that they have seen gains, performance gains.

I have not addressed the question about how that's distributed across -- I don't know the answer to that.

Let's see. Pay for performance? What was the second question?

MEMBER: Whether the performances examined include those that are associated with high-performance in math and science as opposed to existing assessments, which sometimes don't measure the kinds of...

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: ... kinds of performances toward which we're aspiring.

DR. KELLEY: Yes. I think, I think, well, what we've seen is that what you get depends on your assessment. So if you have a basic skills assessment, there tends to be more attention and, you know, instruction driven to that. And you know, there definitely is a link to, you know, what you're trying to do and what you're measuring, so...

MEMBER: But is there evidence that it does work as well when these standards are high? Or does it work best when the standards are within reach, things people are used to trying to reach?

DR. KELLEY: You're asking really hard questions to answer because, when you look at the gains in a system that has a basic skills test, and you look at the gains in a system that has a higher order test, and then you say which gains are better? It's kind of a hard question to answer.

So I think it's a good question. I'm not sure how to get at the question with the data that we have.

The other thing that's difficult about these, of course, is that the places that we've looked at have other things going on. So there is -- there has been research that's been done to look at, for example, in Dallas, comparing the gains in Dallas to a number of other similar urban districts in Texas. And they've seen more gains in Dallas than in those other districts.

You know, there are different other things going on in Dallas, I'm sure, than those other 10 districts, so to say that that's only because of performance pay is really difficult.

I think, for me -- and you know, you have to decide what is enough evidence for you, but, you know, I'm compelled by the argument that this is a huge -- teacher compensation is a huge investment and that it makes more sense to align it strategically to meet the goals of the system than it does to not align it strategically.

And so, whether the gains are enough or, you know, I think you kind of do the best you can and you try to, you know, of course, you don't want to create a system that's going to make things worse, but -- and you're asking the right questions. You need to pay attention to the assessment, what it's focusing on. Is it the things that you want? And if it's not, it's probably not useful. But that's -- for me, that's, you know, what's compelling.

And then, the issue of whether this has worked in high-risk, for high-risk populations, I think relates to the basic skills, higher order, thinking skills question in a way I have heard others describe differences in systems that focus on basic skills as getting teachers to focus more on the risk populations, the ones that you can move up out of the, you know, out of the floor, off the floor.

And that higher order skill assessments may push people to focus more on the higher students. But I think, in part, that's an issue of design in the system. There are program designs that require that you move a certain percentage of people out of the bottom category to the next category in order to be eligible for the reward, and that makes people focus on that group as well. So it is a design issue. I think it's a good question and it's more -- I think it's more of an issue of the specific features of the design of the program.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Walter.

MEMBER: The question is related to all three of those, but more specific. In some of the literature, one paper we read, seemed to indicate that not the knowledge-based tests, but performance-based pay, worked best, and perhaps only, in schools where there was already seemed to be an adequate remuneration base by teachers. And I thought I heard you say that, also.

DR. KELLEY: Right.

MEMBER: And if that's true, then it's back to Deborah's -- the last point, then -- it's -- One wonders if this will work in those high-risk places where, in fact, teachers are not paid as well, which are in many of the school districts that are in the worst trouble.

DR. KELLEY: Yes. The evidence that I have to sort of back up that statement was a reaction of teachers in one of the school districts that we studied, where we had reports from teachers that beginning teachers had to take on part-time jobs after school in order to get enough money to pay the rent because their base salaries were so low in the system. And so getting $1,000 bonus, which is what there was in that system, was sort of an insult to them when they didn't have enough money to pay the rent to begin with. So I think -- I think that's, you know, that's something to weigh, I guess.

What I'm talking about primarily is not the, sort of, the competitive salary against other opportunities in the market so much as having enough money to support yourself with what you have and also conditions of work that are conductive so that you don't tell people -- you don't give them -- we're not going to give you anything you need to do your job. For example, I mean, math and science textbooks. You know, we're not going to give you any materials to do what you need to do, but here's a bonus if you improve performance. You can see how that might be sort of a morale breaker on top of everything else, if that's how the system would choose to spend its money. So, I think it's an important issue.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Iris?

MEMBER: Thank you very much.

Having left Delaware as Commissioner, Secretary of Education in Delaware, and reading just a couple of days ago that Delaware has adopted a system very similar to this, and having lived through the process for almost two years, it is not an easy task. I think you would agree with that.

I think more specifically, Delaware brought to the table more money, more pay, additional pay, in a state that probably paid not as well as it should, as no teachers are overpaid as well as they ought to be, but did bring that, and also negotiated a certain autonomy with its teachers' association.

And I also know Steven Adamowski in Cincinnati who was a part of the Delaware administrative structure with me, so I'm pretty familiar with it. I wouldn't dare try this in Prince George's until we pay teachers better. You just don't have comparable pay.

But I guess my point is that's a negotiated agreement that took two years to look at pay for performance in vastly, in a vastly difficult negotiating arena with a state union association. Where has -- what is the advice to the Commission on suggesting a model like this when Commissioners are in different positions and the Commission itself is in a different position, trying to stimulate, give incentives to districts and states to actually produce better and more science and math teachers.

You know, just taking what you know about this concept, how do you put it into the context of what we do as a Commission?

DR. KELLEY: Yes, I think -- I mean, it is a difficult process. I think that part of the, part of the process that's useful is also part of the process that's difficult. So grappling with what do we mean by performance and how are we going to get it and what do we need to get it all become part of that conversation. So even though it is difficult, I think that it can be productive, while being difficult.

With regard to what do I suggest to you about that, given the different political context, I think that it probably is the kind of process that requires a willingness to work and to go through that difficult process that you're talking about. And so I think having some -- I think it's probably worth having voluntary participation, you know, where -- you've talked about the state sort of stepping up -- states stepping up and agreeing to certain processes or conditions or things, you know, looking at different parts of their system as part of the process of deciding to go into this kind of thing.

I think one of the things that could be useful is to provide a process where a number of states or districts could look at their expectations in math and science and that part of the process of developing a performance pay system is doing that.

So I'm not sure I'm giving you a good answer, but...

MEMBER: It's a tough question.

DR. KELLEY: It is a tough question. Yes. I'm punting.

SENATOR GLENN: I'll tell you, I think we've been here for quite a while and I'm sure some people will want to leave here temporarily at least. I think we'll use some of our what was going to be discussion time later.

Let's have our break right now for about 10 minutes, if we can. Keep it as short as possible, and come on back, and then we'll have Tom and then we can have -- you're still going to be around?

DR. KELLEY: Yes.

SENATOR GLENN: Okay. Then we can carry some of these questions on into that discussion and use up some of our plenary time that was later this afternoon for this discussion since there are so many questions. Ten minute break. Thank you.

(BREAK)

SENATOR GLENN: Okay. If we could all get our seats and those out in the lobby please come on in, we can get started right away. And Tom Gillett, I believe is ready to go, I hope. Tom, how are you?

MR. THOMAS GILLETT: Good.

SENATOR GLENN: Tom is First Vice President and Chief Negotiator of the Rochester, New York, Teachers Association. And so this is an area right in his bailiwick here. So, Tom, if you can go ahead, we'd appreciate it.

MR. GILLETT: Thank you. And I'm pleased to be here among so many Ohioans, as somebody who grew up in Cleveland and attended the other Ohio university. Now, now, we'll have none of that. I hope we get the trademark straightened out satisfactorily. Good.

Good afternoon. I'd like to provide some further information about -- elaboration on the materials you've been provided with regarding the Teacher Union Reform Network, talk a little bit about why teacher unions and an effort like TURN should be part of your consideration, and finally, to provide a local perspective on a group incentive driven by student results, which was originally negotiated about 10 years ago in Rochester.

[See Slide 1] TURN was created in 1996 to promote change among teacher unions, to restructure unions, to facilitate reforms in education, which are more likely to result in better learning and higher achievement for its students.

Its primary goal is to promote new union models that can take the lead in building and sustaining effective schools for all students.

[See Slide 2] It's comprised of about two dozen local unions, almost equal numbers of American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association locals, the largest of which is Los Angeles, with about three-quarters of a million students, the smallest Westerly, Rhode Island, which serves about 3,500 students.

TURN doesn't profess to be a representative group and, in fact, its members depart regularly from the policy statements of their national affiliates on numerous issues. It is a reflection of teacher unions large and small in many regions of the United States, as you can see from the membership list.

I think it's important for a group like this, making recommendations for math and science, to consider the role of unions because 90 percent of the nation's teachers are in either AFT, are members of either AFT or NEA, and it's worth taking a look at the collective bargaining process because 70 percent of the states have some sort of collective bargaining laws which apply to teacher unions.

There are voices that say -- loudly sometimes -- that instructional matters and policy shouldn't be the business of teacher unions. To be candid, more often than not, they are voices of my own members that say that.

The traditional union focus on bread-and-butter issues and that set of interests can't be ignored even now. Many teachers don't see themselves as being agents of educational reform. They think that they're the targets.

And sometimes I hear policymakers -- whether from our local school board, the state level or here in Washington, make statements like "I can see putting some teachers on this committee, but do we have to involve the unions?"

And one response might be "You don't have to involve a doctor in removing your appendix, but the results are probably going to be healthier if you have a practitioner, and we think the same is true for teachers and teacher unions."

TURN is in the process of making the education community aware of why partnering with unions is vital to implementing meaningful and sustainable change.

TURN's connection to the discussion on knowledge and skill-based pay plans, which you just heard about from Dr. Kelley, is both reflective and progressive. Several forms of such plans have been negotiated and are in effect. Others are more likely to occur in TURN locals than in their traditional sibling locals. And the article from KAPPAN that is in the packet points out a number of knowledge and skills provisions that have already been negotiated in places like Cincinnati and Columbus and Rochester and a couple of districts in California.

To me it's interesting to note, in the midst of these discussions about how can certain of these recommendations be implemented, that the old adage about nothing new under the sun fitting here again because many of these plans and examples have been, have existed in one form or another and they've been in practice for at least the last 10 years.

[See Slide 3] I also understand that you're going to be hearing, you have heard, about the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the incentives that are attached to that particular achievement by individual teachers.

And here are a few of the ones that are in place in different parts of the country. I'm happy to note that last, for a couple of reasons, last Friday, the New York State budget finally came in for the 2000-2001 fiscal year, only about a month and a half late, which is earlier than some other years, but among the bills that are reflected in this year's budget is an additional payment for National Board-certified teachers of $10,000 a year for up to three years if they agree to accept assignments in shortage areas or in difficult-to-staff schools.

And among the few suggestions that I might make to this Commission is my opinion is that simply achieving National Board certification -- and that's an oxymoron because it's not simple -- but achieving it isn't enough. If it's not going to be employed to further achievement among students and to extend professional development to other teachers, I don't think the bang for the buck is there.

So I'm pleased that New York State has made that change and I would urge that this Commission suggest something similar to that.

It was a good coincidence, timely, that there was a request earlier this afternoon about the specifics of some of these programs because I brought along some information about a group incentive plan that's been in effect in Rochester for a number of years simply as an example.

If you want to ...

[See Slide 4] Rochester is similar to many, many other urban districts. We have about 37,000 students. The professional staff numbers about 3,500 certificated staff. The number of employees here of 5,700 includes clerical and maintenance, other employees, 39 elementary schools, eight high schools, and so on. Demographically, we're similar to other cities in the Northeast, certainly with many of the same community issues.

I think we have more students in poverty identified by the standards that are applied to such issues than all but about 12 other districts in the United States. So we have a challenge to raise student achievement in a number of areas, including math and science, and we've been looking at ways to do this through the collective bargaining process since some time in the '80s.

As relates to teacher compensation, we've designed local agreements similar to some of the concepts you heard about earlier today. We have a Rochester version of a career ladder. We pay lead teachers more money because they accept additional responsibilities. For National Board teachers, there's an additional stipend for teachers who accept a difficult assignment, and so on.

I'd like to talk just briefly today about a plan that we've implemented for school-based performance awards.

If you want to go to the next transparency.

[See Slide 5] This is a cover from our current contract. This particular plan was originally negotiated in 1992, so we had some experience with it.

You can go to the next one if you would, please.

[See Slide 6] We bargained this form of -- and I don't expect you to read this. There's -- this is included in the materials that I provided so it will, at some point, catch up with you.

About midway down the page, where there's a number 4, it reads, "Incentives, including resources (a $1 million Classroom Resource Fund) to support effective practice and promising directions will be tied to school or school unit progress."

And since this was established in 1992, several million dollars have been dispersed to various schools in Rochester as a result of their qualifying under this group award or group incentive plan. We wrestled with the concept of standards versus standardization.

You can do the next one, if you would, please, John.

[See Slide 7] And what we ended up with -- and this is actually the front page from an application for this fund that one of the high schools submitted during this last cycle, which was last fall -- and I'll just point out a couple of things.

Item number two speaks to earning a minimum of 40 points out of a possible 100 on the school accountability work sheet. And I do have a copy of the school accountability work sheet for this particular school. But it's tied to standardized tests, either the New York State PEP test, which evaluates pupil progress. I don't think that's a good test. We aren't using it anymore. At the time this was established, we were referring to regents competency test and preliminary competency tests, both of which, thank goodness, are no longer in use. Also, some indicators based on the number of students achieving As or Bs in core academic subjects, DRP scores, CT5, DRP is degrees of reading power. Comprehensive test of basic skills.

At any rate, for each level in our district -- elementary, middle school and high school -- there is a different set of standardized test scores that a school would have to demonstrate continuous progress over a three-year period in order to even qualify to write the remainder of the application, which gets into more qualitative issues based on what an individual school may have done.

What we found since this has been in effect is that, on a year-to-year basis, about a half of the schools in the district qualify for this fund every year. And by the way, the qualitative parts of it -- if you could put the next one up, if you would, please.

[See Slide 8] This lists some of the -- bulleted out in the middle of this application blank are some of the standardized tests that were used in the 1998-99 school year.

In New York State, and many of you probably are aware of this, new student learning standards are being phased in along with grade level assessments at grades 4, 8 and 11. I'm very pleased with both the standards and I think the assessments are valid. They're much more rigorous. They, at least the results so far, have not made for good press in most districts, even some of the districts where we would expect our children to do better because they're tough.

They're asking kids to do things that they haven't been asked to do before, and I take it as a very healthy sign.

So many of these standardized measures that are shown on this sheet are going to be replaced by the fourth grade ELA, English Language Arts, the eighth grade math, and so on, in subsequent years.

In the qualitative portion, which is the one that each -- each school that qualifies then gets to describe what it's done, again, based on data if possible, improved attendance, afterschool enrichment, lowering of suspension rates or dropout rates, strategies that they've employed to improve school climate, engaging parents, what a school may have done to improve performance for limited-English-proficiency students, evidence of staff outreach to and engagement of parents and others in the community, student and parent satisfaction with staff responsiveness, professional development opportunities, evidence of progress for special education students, and development of programs that specifically meet the needs of these students, progress towards creating smaller school units.

We still have that old model that America can't get away from where we say, "Gosh, it's not a good idea to put 2,000 kids in one place, especially sixth, seventh and eighth graders," and then we go ahead and we do that again and again. So we're looking for ways to break down schools that are too big for kids to learn well in.

By the way, in the qualitative area or more qualitative area, schools, in order to score the maximum points, need to come up with at least three indicators in each of those categories that I mentioned.

[See Slide 9] I don't know if this is -- oh, this is the sheet I referred to earlier and it's really an eye test.

The part on the right-hand side of the sheet, which shows percentile or values '96-'97, '97-98, and '98-'99 -- and then there's points. The percentage there, the district benchmark, if the school hasn't advanced in each of the three years in the three-year cycle, they don't get a point in that area.

And this reinforces the value of continuous progress and it also makes sure that schools in some sense are competing against themselves. We have some schools, in fact, one of our high schools has this February been designated for the International Baccalaureate program, a very high-achieving high school.

We also have some, this a comprehensive high school, John Marshall, a good school, but doesn't have the same caliber of students in the magnet school that is going to become, that will have the International Baccalaureate program there. So this school is compared against itself and its own scores on a year-to-year basis, rather than suburban schools or even other schools within the district.

And if a school does not score sufficient points in this part, which is the standardized test and comparable data, then it doesn't qualify to even get into the money round, as we say.

As it pertains to the issues before this Commission, a few questions and comments.

Could a plan like this be adjusted or developed to focus on math and science teaching and learning? Absolutely.

Is the plan in Rochester sufficiently tested that we're ready to declare victory? Absolutely not. But the results, over time, are very encouraging, and they're encouraging in a couple of areas that are supportive of this. Certainly, student achievement -- we're paying more attention to it than we might have otherwise, but we also see much greater teacher collaboration and cooperation in the schools when they focus on this kind of incentive.

New York State's move to more rigorous, clearly defined learning standards is well underway, as I mentioned. And most teachers welcome this. They're glad to see the PEP tests and the RCTs go away.

One of the things that is going to be a challenge for Rochester teachers and others in New York State, and I would suggest ought to be a consideration; I haven't heard it mentioned, but in New York State, the learning standards for students apply to all students, even students with handicapping conditions. And I think that needs to be reinforced, whether it's where I come from or where you expect your recommendations to go.

I want to come back to what I think is your central concern and mine, which is math and science teaching and learning. I point out, in the context of TURN's effort, that it's ironic that unions are perceived as being such tireless defenders of incompetent members. The reality is that no one wants a poor teacher removed from the classroom, possibly the profession, than his or her colleague who teaches next door or across the hall or, worse yet, who gets his or her students the following year.

In preparing your recommendations, I'd also urge you to hear student voices, particularly about math and science instruction. Students learn best from well-prepared, experienced, enthusiastic teachers regardless of the subject. And they can probably tell you some things about teaching techniques and strategies that you won't hear from other participants, or at least not with the same conviction.

As Dr. Kelley mentioned, she didn't actually use this expression, but in our industry, there's a perception that all teachers are created equal and stay that way. So we have the same expectations for the 20-year veteran as we do for the person that graduates from Morehouse College and gets hired into a district tomorrow.

We know that's not true, and whether it's in our compensation systems or other things that we do, I think we have to start to act like we know that that's not true.

In closing, my four-year-old -- I have a four-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son, so I have selfish interests in improving this because they're like most kids, they're scientists waiting to be directed. They keep asking the essential questions a scientist asks every day, several times a day -- why? And they ask it about things as diverse as why all the buds on our maple trees look exactly the same to why the effects on my aged cat are so serious.

They're typical, I think, of American kids everywhere in their inquisitiveness and malleability, so I hope we can do something to change the way math and science instruction are delivered to them.

Teachers in the unions are key to developing new models needed to improve student achievement. Whether it's through the collective bargaining process or some other collaboration, they must be full partners in this process.

Thanks very much.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Should we go thro

[Part 2:Kelley/Gillett Questions]